The door opens into a twisty hallway with hundreds of bedrooms that are also the same bedroom on one side and a single bathroom on the other, and the girl leads her to the bathroom. "They'll forget about you if you stay out of their sight long enough," she explains as she leads Denice through what's as far as she can tell a random selection of doors and rooms.

She follows, keeping a bit of distance between them, and tries to catch her breath.

They don't cover much distance at all, but at the same time they cover a lot of distance. Non-Euclidean geometry. They reach an unremarkable room and the "friends" are out of Denice's range and the girl stops and heaves a sigh of relief.

Ugh she was avoiding the non-Euclidean bits for a reason, that's really disorienting. Being out of range of Anthony is worth it, though. She flops into a chair and stares off into space, reorienting.

Another set of nonsensical rooms and places connected to each other in unlikely or downright impossible ways. They're in a nice sitting room that happens to contain a copy of itself on the ceiling, upside down.

"Hello," the girl says.

She doesn't quite make eye contact, but close.

"Hi." She sounds more tired and wary than appreciative.

She doesn't mind. "How're you holding up?"

She wobbles her hand in an 'enh' gesture.

"Yeah. How long have you been here?"

She is not really enthusiastic about the talking right now.

Okay, that's reasonable.

"Do you want me to do anything for you? We're, ah, eventually going to need food, but if you'd rather I just stay quiet for a while and wait I can do that."

(The girl is not particularly good at not talking but she will make an effort.)

She shakes her head.

After a few seconds she picks her backpack up from where she dropped it on the floor, rifles through it, and tosses the girl a wrapped pastry.

—well.

"Thank you," she says. "I'll eat this later, no sense doing it when I'm not particularly hungry."

Nod, shrug.

She goes back to mapping. This place is the worst, it really is.

After a while, she seems to remember that the the other girl is there, and asks, "do you... know, how to get out?"

"Yeah. Or sorta. I know what to look for to get out."

"Tell me?"

"It's—complicated to explain. It's more intuition than anything. The Sideways are... well, they are different in different places. They get weirder and more non-Euclidean the deeper you go, but even very close to the surface they never get normal so if everything looks completely normal it probably isn't. So you need to look for this... sweet spot, kinda, where it's not too weird but not too normal either."

"Mm."

She taps her chest: "Cape. Thinker. I hear..." she gestures around.

"Uh... huh? I'm not sure what you're getting at."

She squints a little, like she's confused at her confusion.

"Parahuman? ...superpowers?"

"I have never heard the word 'parahuman' before, do you mean you have superpowers...?"

Nod. "I hear."

"Uh... huh. How well?"

Lessee, what would make a good demonstration... well, there's a fancy private library sort of in the middle of her range with a path there that's complicated but mostly Euclidean.

"I show? Library," she stands and shrugs on her backpack, "this way."

"—okay," she says, scrambling to her feet and following.